St. HENRY, OHIO — Family-owned and operated meat manufacturer Cooper Farms announced on Feb. The company will use its vertically integrated supply chain to provide a variety of sustainably sourced turkey ingredients to dog and cat food manufacturers.
The expansion was initiated by an existing Cooper Farms customer, who was looking for a turkey byproduct blend but was having trouble getting it due to foreign material contamination in turkey gizzards. According to the company, Cooper Farms’ engineering and fabrication team solved this problem by developing equipment that can split and clean gizzards before mixing them with hearts and livers. The resulting blend is a naturally proportioned mixture of turkey livers, hearts and gizzards for pet nutrition formulations.
“Listening to the customer has allowed Cooper Farms to offer some unique products, like bone cake and bone residue,” said Lynn DeArmond, new business development manager at Cooper Farms. “I like to assign a customer’s request to our research and development department because they always meet the challenge.”
This isn’t the first time Cooper Farms has applied customer feedback to change its business. In fact, the company’s first foray into pet food ingredients began with a customer request.
“Cooper Farms’ venture into selling pet food ingredients began about five years ago,” DeArmond said. “We had a major pet food manufacturer contact us looking for someone to make ingredients to their specs and, almost immediately, we found a niche market that wasn’t being filled by other suppliers. of a mixture of giblet.”
According to Cooper Farms, the company currently offers several turkey ingredients, including mechanically separated turkey (MST), giblets (heart and liver), thigh trim, boneless and skinless wing meat, skin, neck meat, chest, and tendon straps. The company typically ships 2,000 lbs at a time fresh, and will occasionally send product to a third-party partner to freeze it before shipping, if necessary.
The company encourages customers to tour its plant in Northwest Ohio.
“We are very open to customers’ ideas and often new product concepts are generated by something a customer sees while touring our facility,” says Cooper Farms.
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